More crewmen rushed into the lounge, aiming at anyone unfamiliar. ‘Mr Trakas!’ one shouted. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ Trakas replied. ‘Watch her.’ Even in the midst of a tense situation, he still gave Anastasia’s athletic wetsuited body a look of leering appreciation, which she did not fail to notice. Nor did De Klerx, whose lips curled into a snarl. ‘What’s happening? How many others are there?’
‘We saw seven as well as these two, but there might be more.’
‘Two less now.’ Trakas gave the dead men a dismissive glance. ‘Where’s Rouphos?’
‘On his way to the bridge.’
‘Good. We need to—’ He broke off as another exchange of gunfire from the deck below was accompanied by a detonation that rattled the floor. The shrill clamour of a fire alarm echoed through the ship.
‘What was that?’ gasped Lonmore.
‘The gas tanks!’ Trakas replied, concerned. ‘One of your idiots must have shot them.’
‘They’re not my idiots!’ the American insisted. ‘I’m telling you, I came here to negotiate as a friend, not—’
The Greek waved him to silence. ‘Later. Much later!’
‘We’ve got to get you off the ship,’ Axelos told his boss.
Trakas’s reluctance at abandoning his yacht was clear, but he nodded. ‘Okay. Bring them with us.’ He gestured at the four prisoners. ‘There are two more, a bald man and a woman,’ he told his crew. ‘Find them!’
Nina and Eddie raced along the upper deck. The mainsail’s long boom extended out over the water off the starboard side, the great canvas triangle pushed firm by the wind. ‘Christ, now what?’ said Eddie as a strident alarm sounded.
‘Great, the ship’s on fire!’ replied Nina. ‘Just what we need.’
‘At least there’s plenty of water to put it out— Shit!’ A crewman was scaling the ladder in the deck’s aft corner.
A rack holding several life vests was mounted on the side railings. Eddie snatched one up and hurled it at the crewman. The man instinctively raised an arm to protect his head. The impact of the flotation device knocked his gun from his hand, sending it clanging to the deck below. He cursed, glancing after it before realising that the approaching intruders were unarmed.
‘Get to the boat!’ Eddie called to Nina as the crewman reached the deck and rushed at them. She swerved clear as the two men collided. The Greek had hoped his charge alone would be enough to knock the other man down, but Eddie was prepared for it, dropping and twisting to take the impact on his shoulder while simultaneously driving a punch into his attacker’s stomach. ‘Go on, go!’
She hesitated, but while the man was much younger than her husband, he was also obviously a far less experienced fighter. Winded, he swung a couple of flailing blows at Eddie’s head, neither of which landed more than a glancing impact as the Yorkshireman drove him backwards. Now confident that the brawl would end quickly, she ran to the end of the deck.
The launch had been joined at the floating dock by the speedboat that had towed the parasailing Trakas. A choice of two – and no one else in sight. She hurriedly descended the ladder. ‘Eddie, come on!’
Above, Eddie whipped up his arm to deflect another blow before snapping a punch at the crewman’s face. The younger man reeled back, but didn’t fall.
He had to put the Greek down before he and Nina could escape. Fists raised, he advanced—
The crewman glanced past him – then shouted. Eddie was sure nobody could yet have caught up from behind, but the flash of hope in the other man’s eyes hadn’t been faked. He risked a split-second look back at the wheelhouse. A figure was visible inside. Rouphos. If he had a gun, the situation was about to get a lot worse.
Eddie made another lunge at the crewman, who hurriedly retreated. He followed, aiming to trap the sailor in a corner to bring the fight to a rapid end—
The deck rocked under his feet as the yacht made a sharp turn. Rouphos bellowed something in Greek.
Eddie hurriedly stabilised himself, expecting the crewman to make a counterattack, but he too had braced against the change of direction, dropping low. What had the captain warned about?
The answer came a second later as the mainsail’s swinging boom smacked against the back of Eddie’s head.
A moment of insensate blackness . . . then pain filled his skull to overflowing as he regained full consciousness. He forced open his eyes to find himself looking up at the sky, the crewman standing over him with a mocking smile. Rouphos arrived, handing his subordinate a gun and issuing a command before helping him drag the woozy Englishman upright. ‘If you were a sailor, you would have kept your head down around the mast!’ the captain said. Eddie tried to think of a comeback, but all he managed through the pulsing throb assaulting his brain was an irate groan.
Shouts caught Rouphos’s attention. Eddie endured a moment of nausea as he turned to watch him hurry to the aft railing – and beyond him saw Nina reach the yacht’s stern.
But the captain wasn’t looking at her, instead calling down to someone on the deck below.
Nina glanced back, hoping to see Eddie following her, but instead saw Trakas, Axelos and a number of the ship’s crew emerge from the superstructure. Spencer was with the burly Greek, his father and Petra being pushed along behind them with Anastasia and De Klerx. Rouphos stood at the end of the deck above, framed by a plume of dark smoke rising from the ship’s side.
Now she spotted Eddie behind him, but to her horror he was being held by the sailor. The fight had gone badly. And things were about to go the same way for her too, as Trakas’s bodyguards caught sight of her.
Nowhere to hide on the dock—
Instead she leapt down the nearby stairwell, landing hard at the bottom as a gunshot cracked from above. She threw open a door and rushed inside.
‘No, don’t shoot her!’ Trakas barked at the trigger-happy sailor. ‘Get after her, catch her!’ The man ran to the stairwell.
‘You want her alive?’ Axelos asked as the group reached the dock.
‘She might be useful,’ said the tycoon thoughtfully, before his attention returned fully to the situation at hand. ‘Put them in the launch. Keep them well guarded,’ he ordered, before having a partial change of mind. ‘No, the girl comes in the speedboat with me.’
‘Ana!’ yelled De Klerx as he and Anastasia were separated. He lunged at the man holding her, but another crewman dragged him back.
‘What about me?’ asked Spencer.
‘You come with me too,’ Trakas told him. He looked back at Rouphos on the upper deck. ‘That one as well!’ he shouted, pointing at Eddie. ‘Bring him—’
A loud, deep whump from somewhere within the Pactolus shook the deck – and a moment later a second explosion erupted into the open as a section of the starboard side amidships blew apart. Everyone staggered—
De Klerx smashed an elbow into the gut of the man holding him, folding him double. Before anyone could react, he vaulted off the launch’s bow into the sea, bringing up both arms to enter the water in a dive.
Two crewmen fired after him, bullets smacking into the waves as the dark figure dropped beneath the surface. ‘Rutger! No, stop!’ Anastasia cried from the speedboat.
Axelos ran to the end of the dock. The yacht was rapidly pulling away from the expanding splash marking the Dutchman’s landing, still making almost ten knots. ‘I don’t think we got him,’ he reported. ‘He went deep enough for the water to stop the bullets.’ He looked back at Trakas. ‘We can go after him in the boats when he surfaces.’
Another blast from the ship’s innards made everybody turn. A noxious black cloud was now boiling from the ruptured hull. ‘What the hell?’ gasped Lonmore as fire whipped past. The sea itself was alight, the Pactolus leaving a ragged trail of flame in its wake.
‘The fuel tanks
!’ Rouphos cried. ‘We’re leaking fuel!’
By now the sailor had brought Eddie to the aft deck. ‘Abandon ship!’ Trakas ordered. ‘Everyone get off while we can!’
‘The fire control systems should be able to handle it,’ Rouphos insisted.
‘If they could stop that, they already would have!’ Trakas pointed at the mainmast. The fire swirling from the hole in the yacht’s side had swept up to reach the sails. ‘We leave, now!’
‘What about him?’ asked Axelos, pointing after De Klerx.
‘Forget him! We need to get to shore.’
Eddie didn’t understand the exchange going on between the Greeks, but the combination of the renewed rush to board the boats and the flames licking along the yacht’s starboard side meant that he got the gist of it very quickly. ‘Where’s Nina?’ he demanded as he was ushered at gunpoint to the dock. ‘Where is she?’
‘She went back inside!’ Petra cried from the launch.
‘What? Then bloody get her out of there!’ he yelled at Trakas.
The magnate waited for the Englishman to be put into one of the speedboat’s rear seats beside Anastasia before boarding himself. ‘I have sent one of my men after her. If he finds her, they will follow in the last boat.’ He glanced up at the remaining craft, still on the hoist. ‘If he does not, then she will either swim – or burn!’
The fire swirling around the mainmast deterred Rouphos from returning to the wheelhouse to sound the evacuation alarm. Instead he jumped down to the aft deck and went to open a wall panel in the gym, revealing a control board inside.
He flicked a switch to sound the general alarm, then activated the PA system. ‘Abandon ship!’ he snapped in Greek. ‘All hands to the boats!’ It was not standard procedure, but given the circumstances – gunfire was still being exchanged further forward – it was the best he could manage. Job done, he ran back to the stern to assist with the untying of the two boats, hoping the rest of his crew would reach them in very short order.
Had the captain gone to the bridge, though, he would have immediately spotted a new danger.
He had deactivated the autopilot to make the sharp turn that had taken Eddie out with the boom, then re-engaged the system as he hurried back to help secure the prisoner. The yacht had still been turning as he did so, but now it had settled on to its new course.
Straight towards a small uninhabited island, a ragged line of cliffs rising out of the sea like a rotten tooth.
25
Nina ran through the lower deck, hearing chasing feet behind her. Unlike the single central corridor bisecting the main deck, this was a minor maze of much narrower passages, winding past the engine room, holds and crew cabins.
And while her pursuer knew his way around, she had no idea where she was going.
She rounded a corner – only for flames and smoke roiling from an open hatch ahead to bring her to an abrupt stop. No way past. But a steep companionway to one side led back to the deck above. She hesitated, knowing that Trakas and his men might still be up there, but then her pursuer appeared behind her.
He shouted in Greek, but she was already haring up the ladder. Throwing open the hatch at its top, she emerged to find herself on the starboard-side deck. Thick smoke swirled past her, making her cough. Going forward would take her deeper into the choking miasma; her only options were to head aft or jump overboard.
A glance at the oily rainbow sheen on the water put her off the latter choice. The yacht was leaking fuel, lots of it, and fires were spreading over the surface. She wouldn’t be swimming from the Pactolus, at least not from this side.
A recess housed a cabinet of emergency equipment. She pulled it open, hoping to find something she could use to jam the hatch shut behind her, but found only first aid kits, survival blankets, rope . . . and distress flares. She grabbed one – not to summon help, but to ward off the crewman – and hurried back towards the stern.
The two boats had gone.
The launch and the speedboat were pulling away from the stricken yacht, swinging hard to its port side to avoid the floating fires in its wake. Both vessels were full to the point of overloaded, Trakas’s remaining crew having crammed aboard. She saw Eddie in the speedboat with the Greek. Other men were in the water, their wetsuits revealing them as members of De Klerx’s team. Some had grabbed life vests before leaping over the side, others simply taking their chances and hoping their comrades would come to their aid.
But no one was coming to hers.
She looked at the last boat, still swinging from the hoist over the stern. How long it would take her to get it into the water she had no idea. And a bang from behind warned that even if it only took seconds, it would not be fast enough. She spun to see the sailor emerging from the hatch.
Nina backed on to the aft deck and raised the flare, pointing it at him. His reaction was almost amusement. ‘I’ll do it!’ she warned, hooking her index finger around the pull-tab in its base. ‘I’ve done it before. Back off!’
His mouth curled into a grin, and he lifted his gun—
She yanked the tab.
The flare shot from its tube with a muffled bang and crossed the gap between them in an instant, hitting the sailor in the chest. He shrieked, stumbling backwards as his clothing was set alight, and fell over the railing into the ocean below. The sizzling flare went with him . . .
Landing in the spilled fuel.
Burning wreckage had already ignited the marine diesel, but the fires had not been hot enough to spread far, the dense oil being naturally hard to light. But the flare’s magnesium heart was blazing at over two thousand degrees Fahrenheit, and not even water could extinguish it.
The result was instantaneous.
A swirling wall of flame burst upwards. Nina staggered back in shock as the heat hit her. The deck’s edge was already alight, paint and varnish blistering. She ran to the port side, knowing she would now have to take her chances in the water – only to stop at the railing in fear as she saw a new danger.
The blaze was spreading out behind the yacht, its wake stirring up the burning fuel. One of De Klerx’s men had leapt from the ship, only for the fire to consume him as the Pactolus swept on. He screamed, vanishing into the blaze.
The same would happen to her if she jumped overboard.
Flames rose behind the stern, hot tongues lashing up at the remaining speedboat. If she released it, it would fall straight into the firestorm. No way off . . .
A shadow crossed over her: the mainsail shifting as the wind changed direction. The boom! At the limit of its swing, it extended far out from the yacht’s side. She looked around to see if she could climb along it to get clear of the fire—
The sail was alight, flames eating away at the great canvas sheet, but that wasn’t what froze her in fright. It was what was visible beyond the bow.
A wall of rock.
The Pactolus was charging straight at a cliff.
Even with the mainsail holed, the other sails were still catching enough wind to maintain the vessel’s brisk speed. ‘Crap,’ she gasped. ‘Crap, crap!’ The ship’s fiery wake was if anything wider and fiercer than before. Traversing the boom was now her only hope of escape.
She ran to the ladder and climbed to the upper deck, only to freeze in dismay as the burning mainsail split apart, a great swathe of smoking canvas slapping down before her. The boom swung back until the weight of material dragged it to a standstill. Even if she climbed all the way to its end, she would barely clear the ship’s side, never mind the waterborne conflagration behind it.
The cliffs loomed ever closer beyond the wheelhouse. She stared in desperation after the retreating boats as they carried Eddie and the others away to safety—
Something caught her eye near the boat hoist. Trakas’s parachute.
After landing from his parasailing jaunt, h
e had needed help to stop him from being dragged off the stern by the wind . . .
There was no one left to tell her how crazy her instantly improvised plan was, so she did it herself as she jumped back to the aft deck and ran to the hoist. ‘This is absolutely insane!’ she gasped, collecting the chute. The sailors had repacked it after their boss’s return – at least she hoped they had. ‘Seriously, what is wrong with you?’ she added as she fumbled her limbs through the various straps. Trakas’s torso was considerably larger than hers, the harness hanging loose. She struggled to pull it tighter. The cliffs kept growing, swallowing the horizon ahead. ‘Eddie’s the one who has the mad ideas, not me!’
The straps finally drew snug around her chest. She clambered up the hoist, the Hadean sea of fire churning frighteningly below, and leapt across to land on the speedboat’s bow. It rocked beneath her, almost pitching her into the flames before she caught the top of the windscreen.
The shallowing ocean became more choppy. Coughing as vile smoke streamed past, Nina clambered into the hull, making her way to its rear. The Pactolus was almost at the cliffs. She stood and faced forwards – then yanked the ripcord.
The pilot chute popped from its pouch, catching the headwind and snapping backwards . . . too slowly. It dropped as it dragged the main chute out with it, falling towards the fire. Her wild gamble had failed—
The main chute suddenly inflated as it too caught the slipstream. A sharp tug on Nina’s harness sent her lurching backwards off the boat’s stern. She screamed – as the parachute opened fully and lunged upwards, dragging her with it.
The Pactolus speared away as she was carried higher. Trailing smoke, it raced on through the breaking whitecaps – and ploughed into the cliff. The bow shattered in an explosion of fibreglass and wood, followed by an escalating series of detonations that ripped the ship apart from within. The forward mast snapped as if it were a matchstick, the taller mainmast lashing crazily before tearing out of the deck and toppling into the water like a felled tree.
The Midas Legacy (Wilde/Chase 12) Page 30